In pitching Twitter to a client, there invariably comes a point in the conversation where your client is intrigued but not yet sold. “I like the idea,” she says, “but I don’t have anything to tweet.”
Sure you do! Unless your organization produces no content whatsoever, you’re no doubt already swimming in possible tweets: op-eds, videos, speeches, congressional testimony, memos, blog posts, podcasts, news clips—even, if you must, news releases.
If you look at the average electronic calendar, it’s chockablock with meetings and calls and out-of-office reminders; see above. Yet because the wording of each appointment follows a different format, it can be difficult to sum up your schedule with just a glance.
For example, one invite I just received says, “Full Team Weekly Tuesday Meeting – 1-XXX-XXX-XXXX; Participant code: XXXXXXX#.” The invite for a recent all-hands confab is titled, “All-Hands mtg.” Another appointment calls for a “newsroom report discussion,” while another one requests attendance at “TMD Training.”
Wouldn’t it be helpful if all these appointments adhered to a standard format, so that, for example, the first word specified what the given item is? I’ve long been using such a template on my own calendar, and it makes perusing each day’s events much easier. Here’s the format I follow:
It took a recession, but résumés finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs.
Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.
Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?
With the ever-growing pool of amateurs marketing themselves as authorities, the need to distinguish the talkers from the doers is urgent. And what better way to draw this distinction than through the crucible of numbers.
If ever you’ve interviewed for a job you didn’t get, no doubt you’ve bumped into this unpleasant experience.
You interview, you send a follow-up letter—maybe even with some writing samples or references—and then you wait. A week or so goes by, and you check in, yet hear nothing. Another week passes, and your frustration mounts.
If you’re lucky, eventually you receive a form letter that the position has been filled.
Excuse me, but what the fuck?
Last week, Google announced better-than-expected earnings for Q3 2009. Predictably, its stock rose 3.76%.
Yet in our worship of the search giant, we overlook that 11 years after its founding, Google remains a one trick pony. As Jonathan Last recently observed,
“Its home-grown products, such as Orkut, Knols, Lively, and Google Checkout (knockoffs of Facebook, Wikipedia, Second Life, and PayPal, respectively), have been failures. Google’s biggest successes have come from acquisitions. For instance, Google bought YouTube after its own attempt at video on the web, Google Video, crashed and burned. And did the same with Blogger after its blog platform, Pyra Labs, failed. Even the ‘successful’ acquisitions Google has made—Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Docs, and Blogger were all purchases, too—have taken up resources without creating significant revenue.”
Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.
Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.
By now, it’s a cliché that Twitter has real-world value. Yet if you really want to appreciate both the usefulness and hipness of microblogging, try participating in a social media conference where live Tweeting is not only encouraged, the Tweets also are displayed on JumboTrons flanking the on-stage speaker.
The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.
And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.
According to TwitterCounter.com, I joined Twitter two years ago. Yet only recently did I join the Twittersphere.
Let me explain. For the most part, I Twittered halfheartedly and sporadically (usually when captive on the metro). For months, I didn’t know how to check replies—or even understand the concept of “re-Tweeting” (RT). I used only Twitter.com, rather than experimenting with any of the dozens of programs that inject Twitter with steroids. In sum, I viewed Twitter the same way I view picture taking: I’d rather be doing the things being Tweeted or photographed, i.e., living rather than recording.
Given his aversion to the bubble of the presidency, willingness to admit when he screws up, and experience as a professor of constitutional law, it seems fair to conclude that while Obama may disagree with you on a particular issue, he’s at least conversant with the counterarguments. Indeed, it’s said that a good lawyer—and Obama graduated from Harvard Law magna cum laude—can argue both sides of a case.
As such, I think the President would be open to the following question, which I submitted this morning for his upcoming online town hall meeting on health care:
“What do you think—without caricature—is the strongest, most serious objection to your health care proposal, and how would you reply?”